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ROBERT BURNS 

AN ADDRESS 
DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE 
BY HONORABLE GEORGE F. (HOAR 
ON MARCH 28 1901 BEFORE THE 
BURNS MEMORIAL ASSOCIATION 
OF BOSTON 




(guvtt0 QftlemomC ®00odatiott 

INCORPORATED UNDER THE LAWS OF MASSACHUSETTS 
CHARTER GRANTED OCTOBER 31, 1899 



OFFICERS OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR 1901 



PRESIDENT: HENRY NORWELL 



VICE PRESIDENTS: 



TRUSTEES ; 



R. B. Leuchars Peter Gray Henry Norwell, Chairman 

Hugh G. Brown Hon. A. B. Bruce R. B. Leuchars Hugh G. Brown 

John S. Bleakie Jas. Murray Kay Rev. George C. Lorimer, D. D. Peter Gray 

Walter Ballantyne Robert Bleakie 



HONORARY VICE PRESIDENTS: 



Hon. John L. Bates 
James Bogle 
Hon. Thomas N. Hart 
G. W. W. Dove 
Wm. Oswald 

A. M. Stewart 



Col. Curtis Guild, Jr. 

Rev. George A. Gordon, D. D. 

Neil McNeU 

John Chisholm 

Hon. Thomas Strahan 



Hon. John J. Pickman 
D. M. Eastoa 
Peter Kinnear 
Walter Scott, Jr. 
Hon. C. J. Mclntire 



Rev. Alexander McKenzie, D.D. 



CLERKS : 

WilUam K. Campbell, Clerk 
Thomas Grieve, AssH Clerk 
Robert Anderson, Treasurer 



EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE: 

Walter Ballantyne Peter H. Lawson 

Henry W. Fisher George Scott 

Alexander Wight 



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ROBERT BURNS 



You would not have bidden me here to-night, at any 
rate you would not have done well to bid me here to-night, 
if you had thought I should try to say much that is origi- 
nal. Robert Burns is perhaps the best known character 
in history or literature. If we do not say, as Emerson 
did, that the pigeons on the eaves of King's Chapel know 
something about him, yet certainly there is no man, woman, 
or child, where the Scotch or the English tongue is spoken, 
the round world over, to whom the tones of Burns do not 
seem familiar as his mother's voice. When Scotsmen 
meet on his birthday, they meet as children meet at a 
Thanksgiving table, only to recall old memories, to think 
again old thoughts, and to utter common words. If I 
have no title to speak of Burns as a Scotsman to Scots- 
men, I have at least the touch of that nature which, 
whenever men are thinking of him, makes the whole 
world kin. 

There is no doubt that Robert Burns is the hero of 
Scotland. Wherever on the face of the earth there is a 
Scotsman, — and they are everywhere on the face of the 
earth, — that name will quicken his pulse as no other will, 
even if it be the Bruce or Wallace or Walter Scott. 

Now surely it is no slight thing to be the hero of the 
Scotsman's heart. The Scottish is one of the great races. 
I do not know that it has or ever has had a superior. 
Wherever you find a Scotsman, whether on land or sea, 
whether in peace or in battle, whether in business or on 
the farm, in public life or in family life, on the frontier 
or in the crowded city, whether governing subject races 



2 ROBERT BURNS 

in the East or a freeman among freemen in republican 
liberty, whether governing empires or managing great 
business institutions (sometimes harder to govern than 
empires), thinking or acting, discoursing of metaphysics 
or theology or law or science, writing prose or writing 
poetry, — there you may hope to find a born leader of 
men, sitting on the foremost seat, and, whatever may be 
the undertaking, conducting it to success. 

We Yankees do not undervalue ourselves. We lay 
claim also to the quality I have just described. I think 
that I, a born New Englander, esteem the New England 
character even more highly than do most New Eng- 
landers. I like to believe that these two peoples resemble 
each other in mental quality, as their rocky mountains 
and their rocky shores are like each other, and as, in 
general, they have had in common the same stern Cal- 
vinistic faith. I never feel more at home than when I 
am reading the novels of the great magician or the col- 
lections of Scotch humor by Dean Ramsay. Dominie 
Sampson must have been the grandfather of Parson Wil- 
bur. Baillie Nicol Jarvie was surely born in old Concord. 
The Scotch Elder and the New England Deacon are twin 
brothers. Both are good men Godward, and if sometimes 
" a little twistical manward," it is much more rarely than 
is commonly supposed. If either of them loves to get 
money, he knows how to give it away. If the Scotsmen, 
like their Yankee cousins, think it a shame to live poor 
if they can honestly help it, they have at least given one 
noble example of a man who thinks it a disgrace to die 
rich. What a great English writer says of the Scotch 
would answer for the New England Puritan and Revolu- 
tionary Fathers. " Every Scotsman," says Charles Reade, 
"is an iceberg with a volcano underneath. Thaw the 
Scotch ice, and you will come to the Scotch fire." 

So Robert Burns, sprung of a great race, will always 
have at least two great races for his loving audience. 



ROBERT BURNS 3 

He was fortunate also in a fit parentage for a great 
manhood and a great poet. His mother knew by heart the 
ancient lyrics, many of them never written or printed, of 
the mountain and the moor. They were the cradle hymns 
of the child. His father was a Scotch Puritan. Upon 
the plain gray stone in the churchyard at Ayr the poet 
carved the undying lines : — 

" O ye whose cheek the tear of pity stains, 

Draw near with pious rev'rence, and attend : 
Here lie the loving husband's dear remains, 
The tender father, and the generous friend ; 

*' The'pitying heart that felt for human woe ; 

The dauntless heart that feared no human pride ; 
The friend of man — to vice alone a foe ; 
For ev'n his failings lean'd to virtue's side." 

This epitaph has one fault : the poet has borrowed for 
it one of the best lines of one of the greatest English 
poets. Surely no other man ever lived of whom it could 
be said in criticism that instead of taking a line from 
Goldsmith, he might have given us a better one of his 
own. 

Now what was this man whose fame circles the earth 
like a parallel of latitude ; whose words are known by heart 
to countless millions of men, and are to be known by heart, 
as we believe, to countless generations ? He was the child 
of two peasants, native of a bleak northern clime. He was 
born in a clay cottage roofed with straw, which his father 
had built with his own hands. Just after he was born, 
part of the dwelling gave way in a storm, and mother and 
child were carried at midnight to a neighbor's house for 
shelter. He got a little teaching from his father at night, 
by the light of the solitary cottage candle, and a little at 
a parish school. But Carlyle tells us that poverty sunk 
his whole family below the level even of their cheap school 
system. He was born and bred in poverty in a sense in 
which poverty has been always unknown in New England. 



4 ROBERT BURNS 

Among our ancestors, the hardships of the humblest life 
were but like the hardships of camping out of a hunting 
party or an army on a difficult march, serving only to 
stimulate and strengthen the rugged moral nature. It 
was like practicing in a gymnasium. The man came out 
of them cheerful and brave, with a quality fitted for the 
loftiest employment. Campbell tells us Burns was the eld- 
est of a family buffeting with misfortunes, toiling beyond 
their strength, and living without the support of animal 
food. At thirteen he threshed in the barn, and at fifteen 
was the principal laborer on the farm. Wearied with the 
toils of the day, he sank in the evening into dejection of 
spirits and dull headaches, the joint result of anxiety, low 
diet, and fatigue. He saw his father, broken by age and 
misfortunes, approaching to that period when, to use the 
words of the son, " he escaped a prison only by sinking 
into the grave." 

This kind of life — " the cheerless gloom of a hermit and 
the toil of a galley slave " — brought him to his sixteenth 
year, when love made him a poet. His first love, it is 
said, was his fellow reaper in the same harvest field. He 
has given an immortality to all his humble goddesses that 
no royal champion ever gave to high-born beauty. His 
Mary still looks down from heaven on all lovers. The star 
that rose on the anniversary of her death has received a 
new splendor from his muse. No Italian sky, no Arca- 
dian landscape, ever smiled with 

" the gleam, 
The light that never was, on sea or land, 
The consecration, and the poet's dream," — 

like that which his genius has spread over the scene where 
the two young lovers met to pass a single day. 

Walter Scott tells us that Burns looked forward, the 
great part of his life, to ending his days as a licensed beg- 
gar, like Andrew Gemmels or Edie Ochiltree. Yet this 
man brought to the world the best message ever brought 



ROBERT BURNS 5 

to the world since Bethlehem, of love and hope and rever- 
ence for God and man. Humanity the round world over 
walks more erect for what Robert Burns said and sung. 
The meanest flower that grows has an added beauty and 
an added fragrance because of the song of Burns. The 
humblest task to which man can turn his hand has an 
added dignity because of him. The peasant loves his 
wife, and the mother loves her child, the son loves his 
father, better because of the living words in which Burns 
has clothed the undying affections of the human heart. 
He has taught us as no other man has taught us, as was 
never taught us outside of the Holy Scriptures, the beauty 
and the glory of the worship of the soul to its Creator. 
The whole secret of Scottish history, the whole secret of 
New England history, is told in " The Cotter's Saturday 
Night:" — 

" The cheerfu' supper done, wi' serious face, 

They round the ingle form a circle wide ; 
The sire turns o'er, wi' patriarchal grace. 

The big ha' Bible, ance his father's pride ; 
His bonnet rev'rently is laid aside, 

His lyart haffets wearing thin an' bare ; 
Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide, 

He wales a portion with judicious care ; 
And, * Let us worship God ! ' he says, with solemn air. 

" Then kneeling down, to heaven's Eternal King, 

The saint, the father, and the husband prays ; 
Hope ' springs exulting on triumphant wing,' 

That thus they all shall meet in future days ; 
There ever bask in uncreated rays, 

No more to sigh or shed the bitter tear ; 
Together hymning their Creator's praise, 

In such society, yet still more dear : 
While circling time moves round in an eternal sphere. 

" Compared with this, how poor Religion's pride. 
In all the pomp of method and of art, 
When men display to congregations wide 
Devotion's every grace, except the heart I 



ROBERT BURNS 

The Power, incensed, the pageant will desert, 
The pompous strain, the sacerdotal stole ; 

But haply, in some cottage far apart. 

May hear, well pleased, the language of the seal, 

And in His book of life the inmates poor enroll. 



" From scenes like these old Scotia's grandeur springs." 

From scenes like these New England's grandeur springs. 
The spirit of the Scotch Covenanter and the New England 
Puritan ; the spirit that breathed in the prayer that rose 
from clay cottage and from mossy hillside, which make, 

" in fair Virtue's heavenly road, 
The cottage leave the palace far behind ; " 

the spirit which consoled Wallace on the scaffold and en- 
countered Edward at Bannockburn, — we, too, know some- 
thing about it. It crossed the sea with our fathers. It 
landed with them at Plymouth and Salem. It stood, that 
April morning, on the green at Lexington, and at the 
bridge at Concord. It drove Sir William Howe, with his 
regiments and ships, out of Boston. It captured Burgoyne 
at Saratoga. It sustained Washington at Valley Forge. 
It triumphed with Washington at Yorktown. It abolished 
slavery. It saved the Union. It triumphed again at Ap- 
pomattox. It was the spirit of God-fearing, law-abiding 
Liberty, loving home, dying if need be for country. Cer- 
tainly New England may claim the right to stand by Scot- 
land when she honors the memory of Burns. 

No race or nation will ever be great, or will long main- 
tain greatness, unless it hold fast to the faith in a living 
God, in a beneficent Providence, and in a personal immor- 
tality. To man as to nation every gift of noblest origin is 
breathed upon by this hope's perpetual breath. I am not 
here to make an argument. I only affirm a fact. Where 
this faith lives are found Courage, Manhood, Power. 
When this faith dies. Courage, Manhood, Power, die 
with it. 



ROBERT BURNS 7 

•No poet can be great, whatever his genius, unless he 
have in his native language a fit instrument. But few 
languages have ever been spoken among men, so far as we 
know, in which the genius of a poet would not have found 
itself hampered and fast bound, as the soul of Shakespeare 
would have found itself constrained and dwarfed in the 
body of a brute. The lyre of the minstrel must be musi- 
cal in tone. There are the Greek and the Latin and the 
Italian and the Spanish and the English. Among these 
languages the Lowland Scotch is without a superior, if 
not without a rival, for the utterance of what Robert 
Burns had to say to mankind. There was never lan- 
guage spoken under heaven among men fitter vehicle of 
the tenderest pathos, of the loftiest poetic emotion, of 
the pithiest wit or wisdom, of the most exquisite humor, 
than the Lowland Scotch. David might have written his 
Psalms in it, and Solomon his Proverbs, and ^sop his fa- 
bles, and Cervantes his immortal story, and Franklin his 
sage and homely counsel. If any man doubt what I say, 
let him get " The Psalms frae Hebrew intil Scottis," by 
P. Hately Waddell, LL. D., Minister, and read how King 
David might have spoken if he had been inspired to speak 
for Scotsmen, and not for Jews. 

Before we come to what we may call the quality of the 
soul of Burns, let me speak of one or two gifts with which 
nature endowed him which were essential to his greatness 
as a poet. He had the gift of tunefulness. He said the 
things he had to say so that you hum them like a tune. 
It is not enough that a sentiment be noble and true, that 
it be witty or wise, to move the heart and stir the pulse. 
It must be rhythmic in expression. This explains why it 
is that translations are seldom worth anything. You may 
translate the thought into another tongue, but you can- 
not translate the music. Throughout all nature the soul 
needs this influence of rhythm, if it is to be powerfully 
moved. The ship above the water is doubled in rhyme 



8 ROBERT BURNS 

by the shadow below. The rhythm of oar-stroke with oar- 
stroke, the cadence of the incoming tide, the reflection of 
star-lit sky in star-lit lake, — this secret of rhythm, what 
it is, why it so penetrates and subdues the soul, nobody 
knows. Substitute for one word in a line of " Lycidas " 
or in " The Cotter's Saturday Night " another that means 
precisely the same thing to the intellect, and the poetry is 
all gone. The genius of Scotland sings through the soul 
of Burns like the wind through an ^olian harp. His 
thoughts seem to come to us on the wings of melodies pre- 
pared for them from the foundation of the world. 

Burns had the gift of humor. A famous English wit 
said it would take a surgical instrument to get a joke into 
the head of a Scotchman ; to which a famous Frenchman 
well answered, " True, an English joke." Certainly 
Sydney Smith must have been joking himself when he 
denied the sense of humor to the nation that produced 
Burns, Walter Scott, John Brown, John Wilson, and Dean 
Ramsay. I myself know many delightful, wise, and witty 
Englishmen. I know well the contribution which the 
English race, to which I belong, has made to humor, from 
Chaucer, the morning star of poetry, through Shakespeare 
down to Sydney Smith himself. But for all that, these 
stars dwell apart. I am afraid the rays of their humor 
do not shine for their countrymen in general. If there 
be one man rather than another who cannot take a joke, 
and into whose serious and solemn conception of things not 
the slightest humor ever enters, it is the ordinary English- 
man. 

There is a book in two volumes by a Mr. Adams, en- 
titled " Wrecked Lives." He includes Robert Burns in 
bis list. We all know the sorrow and the sin and the 
remorse with which the life of this peasant boy — and he 
was always a boy — was so full. But for all that, I think 
most of us would have liked to be on that wreck. Do 
not be too sure, my sanctimonious friend, that the life of 




Copyright, 1897, by H. Sclierve 




-&XJ 



7^ycV"^^-v' 



ROBERT BURNS 9 

Robert Burns was a sad one. God gave him of his 
choicest blessings. He gave him humor, that most de- 
lightful solace and comfort ever given to man, as a great 
humorist has said, " to enliven the days of his pilgrimage, 
and to charm his pained footsteps over the burning 
marl." With it He gave him, what He always gives 
with it, a tender and pitying heart, where dwelt together 
like twin springs the fountain of laughter and the foun- 
tain of tears. Burns had a humor that could make fun 
of Satan himself, and a kindly humanity that could pity 
him. God gave him the love of common things, the love 
of flowers and of birds, the love of home, the love of fa- 
ther and mother and woman and child, the love of coun- 
try, and, above all, a country worth his love. God gave 
him the company of his own thoughts. Did the poems 
that have brought such good cheer to all humanity bring 
no cheer to their author ? Do you think that when those 
immortal children were born there was no lofty joy of 
fatherhood ? If ever poet knew the heart of poet, Words- 
worth knew the heart of Burns. It was no figure of sor- 
row or despair that appeared to that sure and divine vi- 
sion, but the figure of one 

" in glory and in joy 
Following his plow upon the mountain side." 

If to man of woman born was ever given, not one, but 
a thousand glorious hours of crowded life, each worth an 
age without a name, they were given to him. " Scots 
wha hae wi' Wallace bled " was composed by Burns on 
horseback, in the night, in a terrible storm, when he was 
drenched to the skin. With what days of toil, with what 
nights of sleeplessness, with what hunger and thirst, with 
what scorn of men and women, with what nakedness and 
rags, would you or I buy the immortal ecstasy of that ride 
in the storm when " Scots wha hae " burst upon his intel- 
lectual vision ! The peasant was in good company that 
night when the Bruce rode behind the horseman. With 



10 EGBERT BURNS 

what travail and toil would we buy tlie privilege for a 
week or a day or an hour to think the thoughts of Burns ! 
Do you think that there was no rapture, that there was 
no sweet consolation and comfort, when the light of the 
star that shone over Mary's grave burst upon him in 
the silence of his prayers, as the planets break out upon 
the twilight ? 

I suppose this plowman of ours had many a carouse 
which left its unhappy trace upon brain and body. But 
on that night of more than royal fun when the hours — 

" As bees flee bame wi' lades o' treasure " — 
flew by Tarn O'Shanter, Burns was with him. There was 
no headache or heartache in the cup. When glorious 
Tam, through the window of AUoway's auld haunted kirk, 
saw the young witch, clad in little more than nature had 
given her, take her first lesson in that immortal dancing- 
school, and called out, " Weel done, cutty sark ! " Eobin 
was peeping, too. Perhaps it is all vain imagination, 
but I cannot help thinking that, on that occasion at least, 
the carnal mind comprehended the things that be of the 
spirit. 

He was a noble lover, and he was a noble hater ; and, 
like that of all noble haters, his hatred was born always 
of love. He loved God. He loved Scotland. He loved 
Scotsmen and Scotswomen, who made Scotland. He 
loved flowers and hills. He loved justice and he loved 
liberty. He loved humanity. He hated, and only hated, 
the things that were enemies of these. He hated self- 
righteousness. He hated arrogance. He hated pride of 
wealth and of rank. He hated cruelty. He hated tyr- 
anny. Self-righteousness, bigotry, cruelty, tyranny, the 
pride of rank and the pride of wealth, were the besetting 
sins not only of Scotland, but of mankind at large, in his 
day. They are not the besetting sins of Scotland or of 
mankind at large to-day ; and that they are not is due to 
few men on this planet in larger degree than to Burns. He 



ROBERT BURNS 11 

brought from heaven to man the message of the dignity 
of humanity, of brotherly love and justice and pity for sor- 
row and for sin. And while we lament as Burns lamented 
what was sorrowful and what was sinful in his own life, 
yet the very fact that his life had in it so much of pov- 
erty and of sorrow and of sin fitted him all the more to 
deliver that message to mankind, gave a new power to 
the lash with which he scourged pride and self-righteous- 
ness and bigotry and tyranny, and disposed men to 
hearken and to give heed to that message which perhaps 
no other man could have so perfectly delivered. He 
spoke to poor men in the right of a man who was poor. 
He spoke to sinners in the right of a man who had 
sinned. He spoke to freemen in the right of a man who 
was free. From every line of Burns seems to come the 
old lesson, — What God hath cleansed, that call not thou 
common. 

Not even the love of country for a moment quenched 
in the heart of Burns the still holier emotion, — the love 
of Liberty. He was filled with the spirit of another great 
Scotsman, Fletcher of Saltoun, who said : " I would die 
to serve Scotland ; but I would not do a base act to save 
her." He would never stand by even his own country in 
a wrong. He knew that the purest love of country is 
that which values her honor above her glory or her life. 
That most abominable and pernicious sentiment, " Our 
Country, right or wrong," found no home in his bosom. 
When the administration of Great Britain plunged his 
country into a war against what he thought the just 
rights of another people, he gave as a toast : " May our 
success in the present war be equal to the justice of our 
cause." When somebody proposed the health of Pitt, — 
I think then the Prime Minister, — he gave this : " Here 
is to the health of a better man, — George Washington." 
Just after our Kevolution he wrote an ode for General 
Washington's birthday, of which the first stanza is : — 



12 ROBERT BURNS 

" No Spartan tube, no Attic shell, 
No lyre ^olian I awake. 
'T is Liberty's bold note I swell : 

Thy harp, Columbia, let me take ! 

See gathering thousands, while I sing, 

A broken chain, exulting, bring, 

And dash it in a tyrant's face. 

And dare him to his very beard, 

And tell him he no more is fear'd. 

No more the despot of Columbia's race ! 
A tyrant's proudest insults brav'd, 
They shout a People freed ! They hail an Empire sav'd ! " 

What has he not done for Scotland ? I suppose that ro- 
mantic story which Walter Scott tells so admirably in the 
" Tales of a Grandfather," — a book which should be in 
the hands of every ingenuous boy, — the story of Wallace 
and the Bruce and Kandolph and the good Lord James 
of Douglas, of Bannockburn, of Montrose, of Argyle, of 
Claverhouse, of Fifteen, and of Forty-five, the genius of 
Campbell, of Allan Eamsay, and Dr. John Brown, would 
have made their way into the knowledge and, even with- 
out Burns or Scott, the heart of mankind. Yet, but for 
Burns and one other we should have known Scotland but 
as we know Wales or Denmark or Norway. I should 
be disloyal to the greatest single benefactor of my boy- 
hood if I did not claim for Walter Scott a share in this 
achievement. 

Ay me ! Ay me ! It is lang syne. It is threescore 
years and ten ago, almost, since I used to kneel with a 
book by a chair — I was not big enough for a table — to 
drink in with mouth and eyes wide open those wondrous 
stories in the " Tales of a Grandfather " — they did not 
let little boys read novels in those days — of Stirling Brig 
and the gallant exploits of Wallace, and his treacherous 
betrayal when Menteith turned the loaf, and his dauntless 
bearing at the trial, and his tragic death ; of Randolph 
and the good Lord James of Douglas, who loved better to 



ROBERT BURNS 13 

hear the lark sing than the mouse squeak ; of the Bruce 
and his landing on the shore of Carriek ; and the story 
of the spider that failed to swing himself to the beam 
six times, and got there the seventh, which led King 
Robert in his cabin to remember that he had been beaten 
six times, too, and might succeed the seventh, as the spider 
did ; and the taking of Edinburgh Castle by scaling the 
precipice ; and the getting Douglas Castle back three 
times from the English; and Bannockburn, where the 
Scottish army knelt in prayer, and King Edward thought 
they were asking forgiveness ; and the striking down of 
the English knight, Sir Henry De Bohun, on the evening 
before the battle ; and the death of Douglas in Spain, and 
his pilgrimage with the Bruce's heart, when the Spanish 
warriors wondered that so brave a warrior had no scar on 
his face, and he told them he thanked God that he had 
always enabled his hands to keep his face ; and the cast- 
ing of the Bruce's heart in its silver case into the Moor- 
ish ranks, — "Pass thou first, thou dauntless heart, as 
thou wert wont of yore, and Douglas will follow thee or 
die ; " and the finding the bones of Bruce, five hundred 
years after, in a marble tomb in the church at Dunferm- 
line ; and the great concourse of people — " and as the 
church would not hold the numbers, they were allowed to 
pass through it one after another, that each one, the poor- 
est as well as the richest, might see all that remained of 
the great King Robert who restored the Scottish mon- 
archy. Many people shed tears ; for there was the wasted 
skull, which once was the head that thought so wisely 
and boldly for his country's deliverance ; and there was 
the dry bone which had once been the sturdy arm that 
killed Sir Henry De Bohun, between the two armies, at 
a single blow, on the evening before the battle of Bannock- 
burn ; " and then, afterward, the story of the six Jameses, 
and of the beautiful Mary, and the fatal flight into Eng- 
land, and the scaffold at Fotheringay. Then, later still, 



14 ROBERT BURNS 

thougli yet a boy, I read the stories of Bothwell Brig, and 
of Claverhouse, — I was perfectly impartial between Cava- 
lier and Covenanter, — and of John, Duke of Argyle, who, 
when Queen Caroline told him she would make a hunting- 
ground of Scotland, answered, " In that case, Madam, I 
must go down and get my hounds ready ! " and of the 
death of Montrose on the scaffold, who " climbed the lofty 
ladder as 't were the path to heaven." 

These two immortal spirits, Scott and Burns, made this 
obscure country, smaller than an average American State, 
another Greece, and made of its capital another Athens, 
revealed to the world its romantic history, taught men the 
quality of its people, and associated their own names with 
every hill, and rock, and river, and glen. They dwell for- 
ever in a mighty companionship, the eternal and presiding 
genii of the place. 

" Their spirits wrap the dusky mountain ; 
Their memories sparkle o'er the fountain ; 
The meanest rill, the mightiest river, 
Rolls mingling with their names forever." 

The message Burns brought to mankind was something 
more than a message of liberty or democracy, or the equality 
of man in political rights. These doctrines were rife al- 
ready. Locke and Algernon Sidney and the men of the 
great Kebellion and the English Revolution had preached 
them. Our Fathers of the Revolution had given to the 
world their incomparable state papers. Samuel Adams 
and Jefferson had surrounded these doctrines with an im- 
pregnable fortress when Burns was an unknown plowboy. 
The theoretical doctrines of liberty were held by the great 
Whig Houses in England and Scotland. Russell and 
Sidney and Hampden had died for them. They were 
preached by men who would have regarded the contact 
of a peasant's garment with their own as contamination. 
Our own Revolutionary leaders had a high sense of per- 
sonal dignity. The differences of rank, though not based 



ROBERT BURNS 15 

on birth, were perfectly understood and rigorously en- 
forced among them. But Burns revealed to mankind the 
dignity of humility. His heart went out to the poor pea- 
sant because of his poverty. He never doffed his bonnet 
in reverence to any man because of his accidents. He 
never seems to have had a taste for grandeur, whether 
physical or social. He was born and dwelt for a great 
part of his life in Ayr, on the seashore. His daily walk 
was in sight of that magnificent ocean view, fit to be com- 
pared, according to those who know them both, to the Bay 
of Naples itself. And yet he has not, so far as I now re- 
member, left a line which indicates that he was moved by 
the grandeur and glory of the sea. The great sublimities 
which Homer and Milton and Shakespeare picture and 
interpret to us were not for him. 

The sublime objects of art or nature, " the cloud-capt 
towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples," the 
everlasting sea, the mountain summits, the splendor of 
courts, the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war, 
did not stir him to poetical utterance. The field-mouse 
whose nest his furrow had laid bare, the daisy his plow 
had torn up by the roots, the cottage, the country ale- 
house, the humble thistle spreading wide among the bearded 
bear, the peasant and the peasant girl, the toddling weans 
by the mother's knee, were the things dear to him. These 
were his inspirations. The strength of weakness, the 
wealth of poverty, the glory of humility, are what he came 
into the world to teach mankind. 

I cannot explain it. I do not know that I can describe 
it. I cannot reason about it. But I think you know what 
I mean when I say that we do not think of Burns as be- 
longing to literature, but only as belonging to nature. I 
do not care about finding him in books of specimens of 
poetry, or in collections of poets, or on the rows of book- 
shelves. He belongs somehow to simple nature. I should 
rather almost be tempted to put his picture and include 



16 ROBERT BURNS 

him in Bewick or Audubon, among the song-birds. You 
might almost expect a mocking-bird, or a vesper sparrow, or 
a bobolink, or a hermit thrush to sing his music. Since 
he was born into the world you can hardly think of the 
world, certainly the world for the Scotsman, existing with- 
out him. You expect for him an eternity like that of 
nature herself. While the morning and the evening re- 
joice, while the brook murmurs, while the grass grows and 
water runs, while the lark sings and the bobolink carols, 
and the daisy blossoms and the rose is fragrant, while the 
lily holds up its ivory chalice in the July morning, while 
the cardinal flower hangs out its red banner in August, 
while the heather blooms in Scotland or the barberry bush 
adorns the pasture in New England, so long the songs of 
Burns shall forever dwell in the soul, " nestling," as Lowell 
says, " nestling in the ear because of their music, and in 
the heart because of their meaning." 



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